


The Five Worst Things

by LMX



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Confessions, F/M, Friendship, Serious Illness, discussion of suicide, violence involving a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 13:57:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/586107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LMX/pseuds/LMX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These are the worst things the five of them have ever done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Five Worst Things

**Author's Note:**

> Story idea prompted by jendavis for something different, but turned into a submission for [leverage500](http://leverage500.livejournal.com/)'s prompt 'fives'. Also please note, this is far from 500 words long.

They were a multinational corporation, mostly handling computer components and services. It was pure dirt at the top and corruption most of the way down into management layers. Alec had taken one look at their financials - a nice simple, neat hack; he was learning style - and decided they could afford to lose a couple of billion.

He was fifteen.

Two days later five hundred shop floor and factory workers lost their jobs as an enemy company staged an aggressive takeover of the company. Not stated in the American figures were the thousand workers in the farthest reaches of Asia. A scary proportion had been child labour, but Alec didn't assume he'd done those kids any favours leaving them without any kind of income or place to go.

In another six days, all the dirty top-level execs had been paid off in the takeover and had either retired on the proceeds or had moved into other major positions in other pure-dirt companies.

The original creator of the company - a genius who had developed a low-energy chip that he'd been trying to patent forever - committed suicide when the patent papers went to the new parent company and his shares - his only remaining claim on the intellectual property - plummeted. He left behind four children.

It was a wake-up call. The worlds biggest "GAME OVER: RESTART?" in Hardisons life up until that point. People had gotten hurt. People had died. He'd done that. That wasn't supposed to happen.

He crashed. He broke down. He stopped using his computer and turned to his violin and his paints. Anything to hide from what he'd done.

He was seventeen when he forced himself back behind a computer and booted it up with a trembling fingertip. He did his research. He found who he was looking for. Money from the slime-bag executives' new jobs started disappearing into personal accounts and then got flagged for attention of their accountants, and the patent got re-filed under the correct name just before it was accepted. He couldn't make those jobs reappear, not in America or anywhere else; and he couldn't save those kids from being rehired into factory work; but excruciatingly carefully, he fixed whatever he could.

From that day on he worked a hundred times harder, tried to predict every outcome, to understand the emotional motivations as well as analyse the system. He never wanted anyone to get hurt again.

-

It was guerilla warfare, as much about diminishing the other side's supplies and ammunition as it was about actual firefights. The other side was well dug in, but they had a lot of area to defend and Eliot's side was more mobile. They were slowly weeding them out in pockets, picking off a dozen at a time.

Most of these villages were abandoned, the fighting had been ongoing but between the two sides neither of them had wanted too many civilian casualties. The hospital had held its ground more or less central to the fighting throughout, taking the injured from either side without hesitation. It had long been held as neutral ground, but even they had shipped out when things got too hot.

This specific group had been preparing for a move to the other side of the territory for a couple of days at least. They'd run short on food and there wasn't a supply line running to the tiny village they had been holed up in, so they were cut off. They would have had to make a move eventually anyway, and Eliot's small team had been waiting.

The firefight was short, and as soon as they'd confirmed that no one on their side needed medical attention they turned to the bodies to make sure anything they had on them couldn't been collected and used against them again. Weapons, ammunition, food and clean water, everything came back with them.

That's the only reason Eliot found her - his hands shaking as he pulled aside the body of the solider who had obviously tried to shield her tiny body. He wasn't sure what had happened first, the harsh splatter of blood on her face from the bullet that had torn through her protector's side or the bullet that had gone clean through his thigh and into the soft of her belly.

Her eyes had opened and she had rasped a wet breath - eyes wide and terrified - and after that Eliot had no memory of the following three weeks.

-

It was harder with men than with women, Sophie knew, to determine when you were working with someone who fell easily and passionately in love in the blink of the eye, and when it was purely affectation from a man who knew that that was what women wanted and so played that character when first approached.

She had made an assumption with William - that he was just desperate to get into Charlotte's pants. She'd created the character specifically to trigger that visceral response in him, spent a year establishing the title and the background, so it was hardly a surprise for her that he doted on her just so. She hadn't thought it was love. Not really. Just a teenager with a healthy sex drive.

She had never believed that anyone could truly fall so instantly and deeply in love. But though she didn't realise it at first, William had. Her con flew by more easily than any other she had ever enjoyed. She moved in with William and his eccentric Aunt in their expansive estate and enjoyed every luxury William chose to gift her with. She came to care for doting William in a way she never had for a mark before. They married in their second year of blissful happiness, and the title Sophie... rather Charlotte... gained was now entirely validated.

It was several years of easy living, Sophie establishing contacts she would need later under Charlotte's name and William's credentials and gathering all sorts of useful information and learning how to recreate characters from parties and fund raisers. She learned to mimic a dozen different accents and to mix with every type of person without raising an eyebrow.

On the day William first asked her about children, his Aunt approached Sophie with proof that Charlotte had never existed, and told her that if she just disappeared that no fuss would be raised. They would say that she was scared of the thought of children, or that she had been having some illicit affair. William didn't have to know that she had never loved him.

Sophie should have moved on years ago, she'd gotten lazy in this easy life. She took the offer and disappeared.

Two years later, William's death - liver failure, not suspicious - made the front page of the newspaper. Charlotte wasn't mentioned, even in passing, but her absence was like the white space in the article. Inescapable.

Sophie promised herself she would never use the character again. Charlotte would never be anyone's but William's.

-

However long they'd been friends, there was always a sharp kind of rivalry between Nate and Sterling, and so to come back home with the knowledge that he'd been right in waiting, even if it had taken him a week longer than expected, there was no sweeter feeling.

In the airport he waited as security assessed his credentials before handing back the painting in its case. He returned victorious, only to realise that no one knew he was going to be there and so he didn't have transport anywhere.

His phone had been out of service for about a week, and he hadn't had time to use the payphone in the mad rush in planning to return to the states. The calls he'd tried to make from the hotel to Maggie hadn't been picked up, but he assumed he was just in the dog-house for taking an extra two weeks to get home. The story he had to share would more than make up for that. Sam loved his stories.

He scrounged some forgotten US currency out of his briefcase and used a payphone to call the office and tell them he was on his way back in with the painting. Sterling picked up at the office and Nate resisted the urge to gloat. There would be time for that later.

It took Nate a couple of minutes to realise that Sterling was headed the wrong way when he drove him out of the airport, strangely quiet. "James, where are you going? I need to get back to the office with this, and then get it back to the museum. The longer it takes me, the longer it'll be until I see my wife."

"Maggie's been trying to reach you," Sterling replied, voice strangely flat. He didn't look up from the road. "She left messages at the hotel."

"My phone was off. I changed hotels to be closer to..." Nate stumbled over his words. "James, what's going on?"

"Sam had a doctor's appointment, Nate. Do you remember that?" Sterling glanced up at him, glared briefly before turning his attention back to the road. "You were supposed to be back by then. Damnit, Nate - I reminded you before I left."

"James..." Nate's voice was unstable now, cracking. They pulled in to the hospital carpark and Nate felt like he might keel over with the force of his heartbeat rushing behind his ears.

"I'll take care of everything at the office, Nate. He's on ward 5, second floor. Room 302."

A week with his son, reassuring and consoling at the first diagnosis, through the first round of tests and analysis, being there for his wife. All lost because of some stupid rivalry.

-

At sixteen, Parker had parted ways with Archie and set out on her own. She had worked her way up with the acquired knowledge from private collectors to public displays and now she had decided she was ready to take on a big pot of gold. An art gallery.

She'd picked her target, spent enough time lurking with her sketch pad as a disguise to get details on every security feature and a good map of the grounds and access. She spent three days out of town talking to a fence and dissociating her lurker self from her art thief self. And then she made a run for three of the highest value pieces in the gallery.

They were a triptych by Francis Bacon - three paintings, not small, but well displayed. Maybe it had been too bold for a first run, but she'd known what she wanted the moment she saw them.

She had two of them out of their frames and sensors and into the packing within three minutes of entry, give or take, and she had her hands on the third - sensors still active - when a guard's footsteps came to her attention. She froze, listening to the footsteps advance and waiting for the call to arms. The footsteps quieted, but Parker couldn't force herself away from the painting, locked in battle with it. She *wanted* it.

The footsteps stayed quiet for a moment, and Parker slowly pulled her hands back from the sensors, leaving the painting in its frame. She stared at it. Breathed for a moment or two. And then she ran.

It was two weeks before she found out that she hadn't been seen in the gallery, and no alarm had been raised until the following morning when two of the three pieces were found to be missing. She missed out on almost $20 million that night. Two parts of a triptych are all but worthless.

\--------

"Wait... wait..." Eliot's voice was only slightly slurred, which Parker thought was fairly impressive given he'd been buried in a whiskey bottle since finishing his story. "We bare our fucking souls and Parker gets to talk about a score she missed out on?"

She made a strangled noise of complaint. "Twenty million dollars is a bit more than just a score, Eliot!"

"We never should have started this conversation drunk," Sophie pointed out, looking a little more than dishevelled herself.

"You told me to share the worst thing I'd ever done," Parker moaned. "That's what I'm telling you."

"It's alright, mama," Hardison soothed. "I feel your pain." And he patted her face in a drunk kind of way that suggested maybe he'd been aiming for her arm.

"I think... I think we should all go to bed," Nate slurred, suggesting he'd consumed a truly impressive amount of alcohol. "My bed is big enough... Maybe?"

Sophie snorted. "Well fine, just inviti... intro... i... ask everyone over, why don't you?"

Hardison snored into the table and Eliot finished off the bottle of whiskey.

"We're not bad people," he told the empty bottle, with an edge of gravel in his voice. "None of us."

"I'll drink to that," Nate nodded, but didn't drink to that on account of his own bottle being empty too.

None of them made it upstairs. When Cora came in to open up the next morning, all they could remember was the catharsis of a heavy weight shared between friends. That was... it was all they could remember after the hangovers wore off.


End file.
